I have noticed people mentioning playing with a lack of space a few times and wanted to share my thoughts on the ruler. The rulebook suggests shortening Direct Fire by two units if you need to play on a smaller area. This doesn't really make sense to me, as it messes with the basic range ratio relationship between the different ranges and movement. On a standard sized MF0 board with a 6 ruler length diameter using a standard 8 unit long ruler, there are some interesting "spheres of influence" between the ranges. To keep things less complicated I'm ignoring the size of the frame in these examples.

When you shorten Direct Fire by 2 units you get these ratios:Hand to Hand vs Direct =1/6Direct vs Artillery =1/6Hand to Hand vs Artillery =1/36

As you can see, this change makes Hand to Hand significantly more effective at the expense of Direct fire. Direct Fire now covers 25% less area. Also, a frame with can theoretically run "faster than a speeding bullet".

Instead I propose shortening the ruler units by 1 pip, from 5 to 4. After all, the rules suggest lengthening the ruler units by 1 or 2 if you have a larger playing area. The total length of the standard ruler is eight 5 pip long units, 40 pips. Shortening the ruler to 6 units makes it 30 pips long. A ruler using eight 4 pip units is 32 pips long, only 2 longer than the suggested 6 unit short ruler. So in a 6 ruler length diameter table, a full (eight units long) 4 pip ruler is only 12 pips longer (about 3+3/4 inches) than the suggested short 6 unit standard ruler. So you could use the 4 pip ruler without needing any more space than the suggested short (5x6) ruler.

I have not played with the suggested "short" ruler. I have used a 4 pip ruler in a game with regular (Chub sized) frames and didn't notice any difference in play results. I recommend anyone with a shortage of space give a 4 pip ruler a try.

Hackjob wrote:I'm not sure why you think that. The idea is to have the table size be 6 ruler lengths, which should keep the ratios the same for Direct/Artillery. Did I mess up somewhere?

Oh right, I somehow forgot the effect of a smaller table on artillery. *facepalm*

THAT'S what was bugging me about this! I kept imagining scenarios with ridiculously large tables, thus meaning artillery had no range limit. So with this new ruler, are you intending to keep the ratios the same as with the standard ruler? Maybe I'm imagining this wrong, but it feels like the HtH relationship with direct fire should always benefit more on a smaller area.

Yeah the whole idea is to keep all the range ratios the same as they would be with a regular sized ruler (8 units of 5 pips each) on a standard board (6 ruler lenghts diameter). Okay, I realize now the recommended board is actually 4-6 ruler lenghts, so perhaps I should redo the above ratios with 5 ruler lenghts as the average table diameter, for now I'm keeping it the same for easier comparison.

A 4 pip x 8 unit ruler measures about 10 inches, so a "4 pip" table would need to be about 4 to 5 feet in diameter.

As you can see, a using a 4 pip ruler allows you to play a battle using 6 ruler lenghts as the diameter, on a board about the same size as a "full sized" 5 ruler diameter table.

Also note that using a smaller ruler unit does increase the effective HtH range if frames stay the same size, more noticable with larger frames and quads. However I think it is a less significant change than the effect of changing the range ratios by shortening direct fire to 6 units.

Again, I have played with a 4 pip ruler and did not notice any changes in gameplay.Hope that clears it up little and I'm helping out any folks looking to play on a smaller area.